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to the question the representatives of the twenty-nine States assembled in Geneva will be invited to consider the different forms the reduction should take and their advantages or inconveniences.

Take another conundrum: 'Is there a distinction between offensive and defensive armaments, so that they should be placed in different categories for the purpose of comparison?' It is quite obvious what is in the French mind in insisting that such a question should be put to the Commission. But it really leads nowhere, for what nation will admit that its armaments have an aggressive character? The problems that the eight questions addressed to the Commission raise are in reality evidence of the extreme nervousness with which the French and the countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe regard the proposal that they should reduce their armaments.

I do not share the view that they are deliberately designed by France and her satellites to involve the Commission in such a cloud of confusion that it will never emerge from it with a coherent plan for disarmament. But American opinion is growing suspicious as to the sincerity of the French, and on the face of it these questions have the appearance of having been drawn up with the intention of raising unnecessary difficulties. They represent a compromise between the British and the French point of view, in which the British spokesman on the Council, Lord Cecil, had a very difficult part to play, for the majority of the Council favored the French view.

The crux of the matter is the French demand for an investigation into the ultimate war-strength of nations. This, as Lord Cecil pointed out, would lead to no practical result, because it is impossible by any procedure of international negotiation to limit the eco

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nomic and industrial resources of a country. Moreover, the inquiry would be endless, and might well lead to dangerous friction between the various nations concerned.

But the French reply to this is that, since all the resources of a country, including its untrained man-power and industrial output, would be thrown into the scales of war, their value from the military point of view must be assessed. Otherwise, if France were to disarm to the same degree as Germany as far as visible armaments were concerned, she would have no security, because Germany, with her larger man-power and superior industrial organization, would in a few months prove to be a far stronger military power.

This sounds logical, but, apart from all other criticism, the plan has one fatal objection to it - that there is no competent authority that could decide the comparative value of these ultimate factors in war, even if it were possible to limit them and control them. No country would agree that its industrial efficiency or economic resources should be regarded as a reason for permitting its neighbor to retain larger military forces. To try to reach an agreement on these lines will rouse latent national antagonisms and suspicions to fever point.

But the Preparatory Commission has been asked to decide between the two points of view, and the future of the whole question of disarmament may depend on the answer it gives. For neither Great Britain nor the United States will consent to be drawn into what British and Americans hold to be a meaningless investigation, which, besides darkening counsel, might end in exciting violent passions. But the ease with which the French secured the postponement of the Preparatory Commission suggests that their votingstrength on it will prove superior to

British or American wishes if this solved. Perhaps a scheme will be

question is put to the test.

If the Germans, who have been invited to attend the Commission, range themselves on the British and American side, that will not make the French less inclined to give way. It will require all the tact and discretion for which British diplomacy is justly famed to prevent the Commission from reaching a deadlock on this conflict of opinion. But the Commission, although it will not be less representative of the nations than the International Conference for which it is to prepare the ground, has, as its name suggests, no need to come to a hasty conclusion on any of the vexed issues submitted to it. France has most certainly no desire to be placed in the invidious position of appearing to block the way to an agreement on the reduction of armaments by insisting on an inquiry that, in the British and American view, could lead to no result, and might do a great deal of mischief.

At the same time an effort must be made to understand the French reasoning, which is honestly inspired by fear of the larger population, greater resources, and superior industrial efficiency of Germany. How this fear may be removed, so that France may take the real path of safety by a reduction of her armaments and enable a general agreement on this question to be arrived at which will prevent the competitive race in armaments that assuredly leads to war from starting again, is the problem that has to be

evolved by which the League will be entrusted with the duty of providing not only military but economic support to the victim of aggression. Article 16 of the Covenant will presently be in the melting-pot, owing to the assurance that was given to Germany in the Treaty of Locarno that it would be amended to meet the German objection to the automatic economic blockade. It may possibly provide the machinery for dealing with the French argument that, if a nation is to reduce its armaments, account must be taken, in striking the balance of visible forces, of the ultimate latent war-strength of other nations in their natural resources and industrial organization. By using the machinery of Article 16 the League may be able to give the assurance that the economic and industrial resources of its members, as well as their existing military power, shall be mobilized for the defense of any country that is attacked.

The problem, like the settlement of the Reparation question and the political issues that were dealt with at Locarno, will take time and patience to solve. It brings us back to the root of the difficulty that faces the League in attempting to bring the nations to an agreement on the disarmament question, which is the distrust and fear that still brood over Europe. To dispel this is the important work that has yet to be achieved before real progress in the limitation of armaments can be made.

LATIN AMERICA: AN INTERPRETATION AND A

PROPHECY1

BY JOSÉ VASCONCELOS

[UNFORTUNATELY, on account of its length, we are able to publish only a summarized translation of this brilliant address delivered in Vienna last December by the former Minister of Education of Mexico.]

LATIN AMERICA is certainly in many respects a mere reflection of Europe, but that does not compel it to repeat the history of Europe. Human experience is not entirely sterile; time does not pass in vain. So we Latin Americans are striving toward a new and original form of culture. We do not want merely to repeat the errors of our contemporaries or to return to the

past.

This idea of creating something new in the world has hovered before the imaginations of our race ever since we became independent in fact, ever since the days of the conquistadores and the early missionaries. Unfortunately the Spaniards who first came to America, although men of genius and bold emprise, were not free. They did not come from a republic like Venice or Florence; instead they left their native land at the very moment when her political liberties had begun to wane with the gradual suppression of selfgovernment in Castile and Aragon and her free provinces. From Isabella, with the false legend of her jewels, to Ferdinand VII, the degenerate monarch upon whom history has attempted to throw

1From Repertorio Americano (San José LatinAmerican weekly), March 1, 8

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as

all the blame for her decline, if his predecessors had not contributed abundantly to that, all the monarchs of Spain, and all those of England for that matter, did their utmost to keep America from becoming a land of freedom and justice and human liberty. Both monarchies set up monopolies that robbed the settlers of their natural commercial rights and deprived them of free intercourse with their neighbors. They tried to make America a rich refuge for ruined favorites, and a benefice for fortune-seeking place-hunters. To be sure, there were some excellent viceroys; but the governmental irresponsibility inherent in inherent in absolutist institutions was disastrous for both the motherland and her colonies.

North America broke away from the British Crown fifty years before we severed our ties with Spain, and she is now a full century ahead of us. We did at length win our independence, but we still suffer from the blight of three centuries of blind obedience. Our political parochialism and our dictatorial governments are largely a survival of the slave spirit that must have a chief, a cacique, a general, a lord, or a king to obey. This contemptible and servile devotion of man to man has borne unhappy fruit throughout our history. All our victories have proved but Dead Sea fruit. Our general poverty, our ignorance, our geographical isolation, have delayed our progress. And the system of despotic government established by Spain has been continued

by ignorant and uncultured military chieftains a breed of barbarous condottieri who have been the scourge of our young nations.

They are the chief fomenters of that jealous nationalism that belies our traditions and our cultural sympathies; for we were originally one nation under the sceptre of Spain, a continuous territory with a single language, a sin

The heroic and clear-visioned men who won independence for the Spanish colonies spent themselves in the struggle religion, and a single culture. Their gle. Bolivar, our most illustrious chieftain, lost his popularity and power, and was succeeded by local leaders of secondary calibre. Sucre, the noblest and purest of our idealists, was murdered. A man presumably implicated in that crime was proclaimed President of one of our new republics, thus founding our long line of assassin executives.

In Mexico nearly all our real patriots perished in the conflict or were pushed to one side, and in the hour of victory Iturbide proclaimed himself Emperor, although he was a double traitor, having fought for years in the royal armies. San Martín, the glorious Argentinian patriot, was forced to flee from his native land, where political power likewise fell into the hands of petty generals and assassins. Such was was our inheritance from the monarchy. Tyranny changes its tools, but not its method.

So disastrous have been these precedents that only a few Latin-American countries have been able to shake them off. Argentina did so many years ago. Brazil escaped this plague almost entirely. Uruguay was equally fortunate. Columbia has been governed from the first by men of letters instead of soldiers. Costa Rica and Cuba and one or two other republics have been less afflicted than their neighbors. But elsewhere the struggle between barbarism in its crudest and most primitive form and a nascent and still immature civilization has been prolonged until the present day, and continues to blight our national development.

Our dictators have not only kept our peoples in ignorance, but they have perpetuated their local antagonisms.

selfish ambitions and blind greed for power have wrecked the most promising plans for international coöperation. Only yesterday we witnessed a striking example of this. After a sort of political Moloch called Estrada Cabrera had been overthrown in Guatemala, the Presidents of the Central-American countries agreed to form a federation, and one day the cables informed us that these five executives had voluntarily abdicated their offices and would content themselves with the modest title of provincial governor under a constitutional convention of all the Central-American States. But in

stantly a military coup, a partisan revolt, overturned the revolutionary government in Guatemala, and the plan of a Central-American Union came to naught to the gratification of certain North American interests who are deeply engaged in that part of the world.

These brute-force masters, who override the rights of the common people, are the principal cause of our economic as well as our political backwardness. They are largely responsible for the survival of our great landed estates. Some of our revolutionary leaders have indeed proclaimed themselves enemies of the landlords, but almost without exception they have concluded their careers by becoming great landlords themselves. Military power translates itself into possession of the land; king and emperor spell despotism and latifundia; but political liberty and an equal distribution of the land go hand in hand. Absolutism inevitably spells poverty for the masses and prod

igality and luxury for the few. Democracy alone, in spite of its failings, has carried us onward toward social justice

at least, democracy before it degenerates into the imperialism of overprosperous republics surrounded by decadent nations. Throughout Latin America the military leader has been the mainstay of the big-estate system. Even the most superficial examination of the title deeds of our great landlords shows that they derive in practically every instance either from royal grants or from illegal concessions made by successful generals to their supporters; and these grants and concessions have invariably been made without regard to the prior rights of the people who cultivated the land of the natives of the natives and mestizos whose life was spent upon them. The wealth of the hacendado of Mexico, of the estanciero of Argentina, and of the gamonal of Peru began in every instance with brute-force seizure of other people's property.

Even in countries like Argentina, which rid themselves of military usurpers years ago, the fruit of that ancient evil endures in the form of great estancias, whose owners will not sell them at any price, but will only rent them to tenants who eke out a miserable existence in a condition little better than slavery. If it were not for this close corporation of landed aristocrats, Argentina would already rival the United States, whose prosperity, liberty, and stable democracy are so largely due to the fortunate policy she initiated in the beginning of dividing her land among small proprietors.

We Mexicans shall make no real progress, nor shall we have stable domestic peace, as long as the two social plagues of our country survive great estates and military dictatorships. Our revolution of the last fifteen years has been simply a struggle to break the bonds of land monoploy and political monopoly,

to end the exploitation of the laborer, and to do away with tyranny and militarism in politics. Similar convulsions are sure to occur sooner or later in every other Latin-American country where the government does not accommodate itself betimes to the new spirit among the people. A mere glance at our history shows that every real right we enjoy, every step of social progress we have made, has been due to some revolutionary overturn, when control of the government has been wrested, albeit for a brief period, from the hands of the military oligarchy. The spread of popular education invariably coincides with these brief episodes of liberty. Since Sarmiento put through his great school reform in Argentina his country has ceased to produce Napoleons, 'saviors of the fatherland,' and revolutions. Her sister republics will eventually follow the same path.

Higher ideals nevertheless make progress in Latin America. It is interesting, for example, to observe that while post-war Europe still remains in the clutches of aggressive nationalism and her constituent nations sometimes seem more belligerently isolated from each other than ever before, a powerful movement for federation is manifesting itself on our side of the Atlantic. While Spain is disintegrating into nationalities, our people are dreaming of union in a vast new State. While other countries are erecting walls between themselves and their neighbors, our republics are throwing down the barriers that separate them. We possess, of course, the advantage of an ancient culture derived from a single source and an illustrious tradition that has not faded even during our darkest periods of barbarism and tyranny. When we broke away from the Spanish monarchy we did not sever our ties with Spanish civilization. We have drawn heavily,

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